Turn of the Cards

It was the last Renaissance studio album to include excerpts from existing classical pieces, and the first made after Dunford joined as an acoustic guitarist. In Britain it was the first release on Miles Copeland's new label BTM, which folded in 1977 after ten albums. In the United States it came out on Sire in August 1974, reached 94 and stayed on the Billboard 200 for 21 weeks. The British release followed in March 1975. Hipgnosis designed the cover, with Warwick Castle in the background, and the title came from their artwork.

The band returned to De Lane Lea with Dick Plant. Richard Gottehrer, a co-founder of Sire, is also credited as co-producer, though Sullivan said Gottehrer never came to the studio and only helped on the final remix of Things I Don't Understand in the United States. Jimmy Horowitz wrote the orchestral arrangements, with what Sullivan called a soft touch on the strings.

Running Hard quotes a phrase from Mr. Pine on the Illusion album and a piece by the French composer Jehan Alain, both at Tout's suggestion, and Cold Is Being takes its music from the Adagio in G minor attributed to Albinoni. Things I Don't Understand was McCarty's last released contribution, though Camp said it was already in the live set when he joined in 1972. Its first take was a spontaneous instrumental jam that a tape operator accidentally erased. Thatcher said Black Flame, inspired by the Vietnam War, was about the human potential for wrongdoing. Mother Russia was a case where Thatcher wrote the lyrics before there was any music, drawing on Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

An expanded edition from Esoteric Recordings was released on 20 March 2020.